Can I use 15K SAS drive on IBM server

I am upgrading an IBM X3500 (7977) It has 3 IBM Hot swappable SAS drives now on server 2003. I want to update to server 2008 and put in either 4 WD WD6001HKHG 600Gb or 5 Seagate Cheetah ST3450857SS 450Gb in a Raid 5 array. Can I use either in the IBM and are they hot swappable

Those WD drives are 10K RPM, BTW, not 15K. IBM never certified those drives, so personally I would stay away from them. IBM does certify the Cheetah family, so go with those.

But note that unless you buy the HDDs from IBM, they will not have the IBM firmware. So you do have higher risk of performance issues in degraded situations. If this is an important machine, then do yourself a favor and pay (almost) twice as much and get the right drives. No doubt you got your money's worth with the IBM disks and the system was stable.

Now one can program the non-IBM branded disks to have the same optimal firmware settings that IBM sets, but you'd have to send out the disks to somebody who could do that, and it will cost you. Since you have 5 drives (not 1 or 2) then you'll probably come out ahead. But still you won't have the IBM warranty.

Your decision. I advise you do the math and go IBM disks with IBM firmware if budget allows. If budget prevents this, then use the cheetahs.

You want to use 15K disks for speed and yet hammer the write speed down by using RAID 5? It depends on the read/write percentage of course but normally more of the slower disks in RAID 10 perform better than a few less of the faster disks in RAID 5 for a similar cost.

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